“I have been often asked how it is that we wound up in Washington, D.C. and at George Washington University,” said Peter Hotez, Walter G. Ross Professor and chair of GW’s Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Tropical Medicine.
Dr. Hotez, an internationally renowned researcher who is also president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, addressed about 200 people in the Jack Morton Auditorium at a Symposium on Global Health Solutions through Science and Technology yesterday.
The event commemorated the 10-year anniversary of the department, which was founded as a new type of academic microbiology department that draws on basic and translational research and applied biotechnology to address some of the world’s most prevalent infectious and parasitic diseases.
In his remarks, Dr. Hotez remembered the decision he made in 2000 to come to GW from Yale University.
With a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Hotez and his colleagues could afford to be choosy. “With this substantial funding, we could have gone almost anywhere in the country,” he said. “So I ask you the rhetorical question: Where does one go in order to learn how to translate genes and antigens and turn them into a bottle of hookworm vaccine?”
In Washington, Dr. Hotez and his colleagues were able to get as close as possible to the only experts they knew to be developing vaccines in the nonprofit sector – the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the National Institutes of Health.
Once they had decided on the Washington metro area, Dr. Hotez and his colleagues considered all “the usual suspects,” including University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University.
“But when I saw the space on the seventh floor of Ross Hall, the GW Medical School research building, I looked out of the window, and what did I see? The World Bank, Pan American Health Organization … the State Department and the White House,” Dr. Hotez said. “As my colleague at GW Alan Greenberg would later say, ‘We are in Rome at the height of the Roman Empire.’”
Being in “Rome” was also important to Dr. Hotez, because sometimes making the bottle of vaccine ironically turns out to be the “easy part.”
“Unless one builds global consensus on how to widely distribute hookworm, schistosomiasis, toxoplasmosis and malaria vaccines they might never be used as products,” he said.
At GW, Dr. Hotez helped create what he calls one of the only nonprofit product development partnerships embedded in an academic institution in the nation.
“Today, the department has a full slate of 20 faculty members occupying space on the seventh and fourth floors of Ross Hall dedicated to solving global health problems through science and technology,” he said.
The department and the institute recently received “important additional support” from the Carlos Slim Foundation to create vaccines for distribution in Mexico and Brazil, Dr. Hotez said, and a $15.6 million stimulus package, which will create a new Center for Neglected Tropical Diseases and Neglected Infections of Poverty.
“Ultimately, I hope these activities might lay the cornerstone for the creation of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Neglected Infections of Poverty, the first of its kind in the U.S.,” he said, and will “provide a unique mechanism for training a new generation of physicians, nurses, physicians assistants and other health professionals, as well as scientists on how to solve global health problems.”
Other speakers at the symposium included GW professors Imtiaz Khan, Paul Brindley, Michael Bukrinsky and Maria Elena Bottazzi.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, delivered a keynote lecture on “Addressing Infectious Diseases of Global Health Importance: The Research Path.”
Although he is encouraged by the tremendous interest in global health he encounters, particularly on college campuses, Dr. Fauci said sustainable commitment to research and implementation is necessary. “Sometimes things in medicine go in fads,” he said.
“When people like Bono disappear from the scene, and Brad Pitt and Angelina and others disappear, there is still going to be the need for global health,” he said. “We really need to keep that on the radar screen.”